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How to easily increase market share, revenues and employee engagement

Let me ask you something – have you ever worked in a business where you found that they were having issues with sales, revenues, losing market share or where they were worried about the employees not being involved, effective or engaged in their jobs? I bet every single person reading this would have to honestly answer yes to that.

This is because every business regardless if it’s small, medium or a large international business, will have its issues and problems. But did you know there’s an easy solution to this? There’s a very simple almost zero cost way to reinvigorate any business. A way to reestablish market share, increase sales and revenues and greatly increase the employees enjoyment and engagement in their jobs. What is this simple method, way or technique?

It’s called soliciting and implementing employee ideas. It’s that simple. I can’t tell you how many companies I have worked at that don’t do this at all or very little. They are literally wasting millions and millions of dollars in potential sales and revenues and throwing them down the drain. Your employees in any company or your best resources for growth, for opening up new market channels, for finding new ways to better do things and save man-hours (like in warehouse, operations and logistics), make safer working environments, or even create new products, new services and more.

There are businesses out there that will have suggestion boxes – I see is often times at hospitals – but their problem is they don’t follow through and implement any of those suggestions. The executives and upper management think they know everything about their business or industry and they’re not open to change. They don’t want to hear ideas from the lowly employees. That’s wrong because the best ideas in business usually come from your employees. It may not come from them while they’re at your business because you wouldn’t listen to them. Instead it might come from them when they go to their next company or start their own and they become the next big name in the industry.

This happens every day in the business world. Only recently are these ideas becoming more of public knowledge. The highest growth businesses that constantly grow and exceed their goals every year utilize this aspect of their employees. When an employee comes up to a manager with an idea don’t just discredit them or tell them they don’t know what they’re doing or talking about – write it down and talk about it in your next meeting if it’s something worth looking at. Also don’t forget to give the employee credit for their ideas. And never, ever take credit for their idea. That’s just wrong and it will come back to bite you in the end – life is good about things like that. Karma is real and it does work.

So the idea here is to find an open way to channel good ideas and contributions from your employees in any business. Make this a company wide initiative and also make sure you don’t just solicit their ideas but that you also make efforts to try and implement the good ones. The ones that work and save the company money or grow market share or increase sales – publish those and give credit to the employee or employees it came from.

By doing this you’re creating goodwill and you’re also in an underhand way creating employee engagement and ownership. Your employees will see that they are valued employees. Upper management cares about their thoughts and ideas. This will go very far and make your employees more engaged, more productive and happier.

Another idea is to give them incentives too. Reward those employees that gave the company great ideas that saved money and man-hours. Reward those employees that gave you those new techniques for increasing sales or for new products to sell. Don’t assume your employees are gonna stay with you forever especially when you don’t listen to them or their ideas.

By not doing this you’re pretty much guaranteeing your business that those employees that you’re not listening to whom are full of great ideas will start looking for employment elsewhere or start their own businesses. In today’s competitive environment, you cannot afford to lose bright employees. It doesn’t matter if their ideas are for an entirely different department then the one that they are assigned to. There needs to be a process in place to ask for the employees ideas, to put these ideas through a testing and trial phase and then to implement the ones that are found to save the company money, open up new markets or market share, etc.

So there you have it – this has been proven in every single industry. If a business wants to easily increase market share, revenues, employee engagement and/or ownership and happiness, they need to listen to their employees. They need to make a process that is well known to everyone in the company that solicits ideas from employees and then implements the best ones. Not every idea is going to pan out, but out of 500 ideas you are sure to get at least 20 that are going to reinvigorate your company, increase sales or do something else phenomenal that will help your company grow and become more competitive in the coming years.

What does a company have to lose by listening to their employees? Nothing. And guess what they have everything to gain from it. If your business has managers that are opinionated and won’t listener to their employees, they need to get rid of those managers because they’re actually costing them money lots and lots of money – in most cases millions of dollars. If you are currently in a business where your managers are not listening to you you need to go elsewhere where they will because they’re just holding you back.

See, every employee has value. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be employed at your company. Employers, managers and executives need to see them for this and solicit their ideas and then implement them and then watch what will happen – even a company that’s headed for bankruptcy can be turned around quickly by giving their employees a sense of ownership in the company. This has actually happened solely because the managers, upper management and executives learned how valuable their employees really are and started utilizing them in this way. Plus, as an added bonus, employers that listen to their employees ideas and make an effort to implement them have a 40% higher retention rate and a 28% greater rate of employee engagement (Training Magazine July issue 2015)

And employer’s – if you’re not utilizing the ideas of your employees in the manner that I spoke about in this article your competitors will and you are doomed to failure. Reinvigorate your business, your employees and your overall competitiveness by listening to your employees and giving them a voice. There is nothing that completely engaged employees cannot achieve.

“what the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.” – Napoleon Hill

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And most importantly remember the one that made it all possible – God.